When it comes to selecting a general-purpose workstation I tend to be looking for the impossible: high performance, superb reliability, quiet operation, moderate price. Amazingly, there exists at least one device with all those qualities: the Fujitsu Celsius J550. The Perfect Workstation The perfect workstation should be: reliable fast silent well-supported energy-efficient user-upgradeable small …and […]

A while ago I described how to compact an Ubuntu VHDX running on Hyper-V using the sfill command. Running sfill, however, can take hours. Luckily, there is a much faster alternative. Ubuntu Trim and Hyper-V Ubuntu running in a Hyper-V virtual machine has been supporting the trim command since version 14.04 (details). The OS issues […]

Keyboard shortcuts are the key to productivity and efficiency. This is true for any machine, any OS and any application. This article lists shortcuts I personally find very helpful and use often. In selecting what to include I focused on shortcuts that might be less well known. Many shortcuts work in other than the described […]

How do popular browsers differ in compute footprint when running animations? In this article I am comparing the CPU as well as the GPU utilization of Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox. To make things more interesting I tested GPU performance on Nvdia and Intel. (more…)

Over the years I have worked with Group Policy in many different ways. My experience ranges from helping an enterprise client establish a brand new set of policies for physical PCs and VDI machines to authoring ADM/ADMX/ADML files. Last year I presented and wrote a very detailed analysis of the impact of Group Policy on […]

The Lenovo Yoga 900 packs some amazing hardware in an ultraportable 1.29 kg 13″ chassis: high-resolution 3200×1800 screen, Intel Core i7-6500U CPU, 16 GB RAM. The only downsides I found so far: glossy display, maximum SSD size is 512 GB, OS is Windows Home, not Pro. There is not much we can do about the […]

I came across this problem while preparing my sessions for this year’s conferences. The setup is boringly simple: a user with a roaming profile logging on to a Windows 10 machine. The interesting part: every second time, loading the roaming profile would fail – causing a 35 second logon delay. Every other time, it would […]

Your low-cost high-performance cloud data center building block. This guide explains how to install Windows Server 2012 R2 on Hetzner’s EX51-SSD dedicated servers. That line of servers is very attractive for virtualization as it combines a fast CPU with a good amount of RAM and SSD storage – at a price point of less than […]

Microsoft just announced a new service called Enterprise State Roaming. The broader goal seems to be to replace roaming user profiles. That, however, is not going to happen any time soon. What We Know Here is the link to the announcement. Requirements An Azure Active Directory Premium subscription is required. In addition to that Enterprise […]

When sizing a new environment it is tempting to use averages. It seems the logical thing to do. But is also guarantees a bad user experience. Example: Sizing an RDS or XenApp Farm Let’s say your tasked with building a new Citrix XenApp farm. Being a diligent IT person you set up a pilot: one […]

Note: if your guest OS supports the trim command you can use the faster method described in this article. If you configured your Hyper-V virtual machines with dynamically expanding virtual disks you will find that the VHDX files backing the virtual disks always grow in size, they never shrink. Eventually this becomes a problem either […]

This article is based on my Splunk .conf 2015 session and is the second in a mini-series on Splunk data model acceleration. Make sure to read parts 1 and 2 first. Searching Accelerated Data Models Which Searches are Accelerated? The high-performance analytics store (HPAS) is used only with Pivot (UI and the pivot command) and […]

This article is based on my Splunk .conf 2015 session and is the second in a mini-series on Splunk data model acceleration. Make sure to read part 1 first. Under the Hood HPAS Population The high-performance analytics store (HPAS) is populated by scheduled searches that run every 5 minutes. The HPAS spans a user-defined time […]

This article is based on my Splunk .conf 2015 session and is the first in a mini-series on Splunk data model acceleration. Why Accelerate? Have you ever seen this? Splunk is great and very fast with needle in a haystack searches, e.g. find a specific keyword in millions of events. It is not so fast […]

It smacks of lazy reviewers looking for eye-candy. Simon Crosby, former Citrix CTO Citrix Synergy Team, I am writing to you as a guy who has presented many times at Synergy. This year alone I had three sessions, one in cooperation with my community peers Aaron Parker and Shawn Bass, the other two on my […]

If you work with text, you need version control. That rule applies regardless of whether you write code or poetry (some might argue that those two are the same, anyway). Ignoring the CVS and SVN dinosaurs two distributed version control systems are being regarded as state of the art: Git and Mercurial. Functionality-wise they are […]

As I found out the (excellent) Egnyte Desktop Sync client for Windows ignores directories that have the system attribute set. For some reason some of the directories I wanted to sync did have this attribute set. Getting rid of the system attribute on (many) directories is harder than it seems. (more…)

As far as I know there is no “official” way to set the width, height and screen position of Citrix Desktop Viewer in window mode. It can be done easily by changing a few registry values, though. (more…)

Update 2015-04-28: Citrix provides the limited release hotfix ICATS760WX64009 that fixes this issue. More information below. During the research for my session about the XenApp 7.6 logon process, to be presented at Citrix Synergy and BriForum London, I noticed that the logon to my XenApp 7.6 lab server was taking a bit long. Longer, in […]

One of the (many) great things about Splunk is that data, once indexed, is not being tampered with. Of course you can choose for how long you want to retain your data, but Splunk won’t go and average multiple older events into one, because that would flatten peaks and remove potentially important detail. This means […]

Splunk’s Universal Forward has the neat capability of executing arbitrary scripts while capturing their output and sending that to Splunk. This feature allows you to turn any executable, batch file or PowerShell script into a Splunk data source, making the data collection options basically limitless. This post explains a few tricks that are difficult to […]